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In The Grey Forests

- portrait

"She was tiny, not much over four and a half feet high, her body thin and fragile-seeming, although there was a lean, implied athleticism to her as if she concealed within her small, spare frame a strength wholly disproportionate to her size. Her hands were large, long-boned, with strong, sensitive fingers, the knuckles scarred from sword-practice.

But it was her face which proclaimed her unhumanness most visibly. She had the high-cheekboned, enigmatic face of a cat, both feral and gentle at once. Her jaws and chin were prognathous but delicate, and the wide, expressive mouth revealed twin gleams of ivory at the corners where her canines projected slightly over her bottom lip. A small, flat, muzzle-like nose bore a scattering of freckles that disappeared into the dark feathering of hair along her jawline. The coarse, straight hair of her mane, the same tawny-brown as that on her limbs and body, was chopped short at her shoulders and hung in a thick, ragged fringe above emerald eyes, whiteless, slit-pupilled and lambent in the torchlight. Despite the smile that came readily to her, in unguarded moments her glance flicked from side to side like that of a wary animal, as if she were used to, and expecting, ill-treatment, and her eyes held buried in their depths an old sadness like that of loss or long estrangement.

Resting on the rock next to her, within easy reach, a leather scabbard held a plain, unadorned shortsword, a fighter's weapon, its hilt worn smooth with use, and a heavy dagger rested on her left hip, supported by a leather belt. A small firestone glowed crimson in the hollow of her throat."

More images of Caeci can be found in other sub-sections of the 'Artwork' part of this site. She also appears in the story extract 'Of Mist and Marshlight' in the Writing section.

Apart from trying to capture Caeci's features and build in the morphs applied to the model here, I was really trying to get a realistic look to the lighting and the environment to make it seem as if she was in the woods. Several lighting states were applied in the original renders and these were then enhanced in the post-work in Photoshop.

If you would like to see this picture in more detail, this image links to a larger version. The larger version is 141 k in size.

Rendered in Poser 4, with all original texture maps and post-work in Photoshop.

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